Among a certain intellectual set, the Supreme Court of Canada is a dignified institution of fair-minded and dispassionate law, beyond reproach, and beyond the grubby reach of common politics.

The court, the Constitution and the Charter of Rights and Freedoms are — or so, the elite thinking tends to go — sacrosanct. So when Prime Minister Stephen Harper issued a statement last week accusing Supreme Court Chief Justice Beverley McLachlin of making improper phone calls in advance of Marc Nadon’s appointment to the court (an appointment eventually quashed by Ms. McLachlin and her fellow justices) the legal establishment was scandalized.

Even for Mr. Harper, who has a reputation for attacking civil servants who oppose his political will, this was purportedly a new low and a shocking fit of vulgar pique.

The Canadian Council of Law Deans said the claims could harm the independence of the court.

“There are very few issues on which all members of the legal community spontaneously agree,” the organization asserted in a statement.

“The unanimous condemnation of the government’s statements regarding Chief Justice McLachlin reflects our shared sentiment that this is an unfortunate and unprecedented attack on one of the most important institutions of Canada’s constitutional democracy.”

But to Mr. Harper and many of his fellow conservative travellers, the court has never been lionized as anything like an “important institution” of democracy; quite the opposite: a foe of democracy, routinely usurping the supremacy of Parliament and the people’s will. This latest assault is hardly unprecedented; it is the awakening of entrenched animosities that Canadian conservatives have long held toward the court, well before they enjoyed the platform of power.

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Conservatism — and western conservatism in particular — has remained skeptical and, sometimes, outright hostile to the “judicial activism” the courts have displayed since the Charter of Rights and Freedoms was enacted in 1982. Part of this anger was fuelled by social conservatism, particularly on issues of abortion and gay rights. Part of it, also, was rooted in the fact that the Charter gave the courts unprecedented power to overturn Parliamentary legislation.

Much of this antipathy to the judiciary may have lain dormant until recently. Though Conservatives were finally in power, Judge McLachlin’s court had not, till recently, proved particularly bothersome, having toned down some of the perceived excessive activism of decades past. Yet among those who share Mr. Harper’s ideological leanings, the Supreme Court has never been seen as apolitical or beyond reproach.

Since the late ’80s, they’ve warned that the Charter was too expansive, that it gives far too much power to the judiciary. And in the subsequent 30 years, many of their predictions and fears turned out, as it happened, to be entirely justified.

In the past six months, the government has lost five major court battles; among them, a ruling liberalizing prostitution and allowing more lenient criminal sentences. The court’s rejection of Marc Nadon — widely criticized by many observers beyond the Conservative base — may have sparked the most recent public feud, but the court’s uncompromising decision on the Senate reform question constituted a rebuke to one of the most deeply held concerns in the Western conservative movement that carried Mr. Harper to power.

So it should come as little surprise that all the age-old enmities have been reawakened.

“The small-c conservative policy mix is a mix of beliefs in free markets and traditional Judeo-Christian ethics,” said Ted Morton, co-author of The Charter Revolution and The Court Party.

Mr. Morton is an influential member of the so-called Calgary School of conservative political thought, from whence Mr. Harper hailed. Mr. Morton’s book argued that the Charter gave the Supreme Court enormous power to alter government policy.

There were a whole host of rulings in recent decades that attracted conservative ire — the striking down of abortion laws being one obvious example. The court also demanded voting rights for convicts, loosened pornography laws, restricted extradition for criminals facing capital punishment abroad, and restricted freedom of speech.

Some of the issues were pursued by special interest groups but were, with judicial blessing, made the law of the land, even in the face of popular opposition.

“From freedom of speech to freedom of religion and freedom of association, in almost all of these areas, not only did the courts show no support for these traditional small-c conservative values, but it has dismantled quite a few policies that were based on them,” Mr. Morton said.

Conservatives soon came to reject the idea that the Supreme Court was apolitical. In the ’80s and ’90s, many of these rulings could at least be explained away by being the dictates of Liberal-appointed judges. But the fact that Mr. Harper’s latest losses come at the hands of a court that was appointed mostly by his own office can only have intensified the notion that the Supreme Court is a fundamentally flawed institution — indicative of an ideological system that is inherently stacked against fundamental Canadian values.

“There’s an ideological homogeneity in Canadian law schools,” Mr. Morton said. To train for the legal profession, he said, is to study the “politics of victimology.”

Preston Manning grants this opposition to judicial activism traces its roots to the then-nascent Reform Party that he helped found.

“If you believe in the supremacy of the Parliament, which I do — and I think Stephen [Harper] does — you have real reservations about the Charter and the Constitution Act,” the former Reform leader said.

“It, in essence, undermined the supremacy of Parliament and gave the judges a much more active role in overriding decisions of Parliament.”

For many in Western Canada, the fight was not an abstract one. Firstly, it came amid growing discontent with then Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau in the wake of the National Energy Program. There were fears that the Constitution at the time represented a further overreach of Ottawa’s powers — the reason why Western premiers insisted on the notwithstanding clause and other contingencies to contain the Charter’s power.

Fuelled at the time by a sense of Western alienation, conservative pundits were near frantic with disapproval over the court and the Charter — a panic that began to quiet only a decade ago.

However, even then Mr. Harper raised eyebrows in Central Canada when he maintained his authority to invoke the notwithstanding clause. In 2006, he told reporters that he thought the Liberals had stacked the courts. When asked whether he thought judges were activist, he simply said: “Some are, some aren’t.”

In 2001, Vic Toews, as the Canadian Alliance’s justice critic, accused the Supreme Court of being “engaged in a frenzy of constitutional experimentation that resulted in the judiciary substituting its legal and societal preferences for those made by the elected representatives of the people . . . [producing] legal and constitutional anarchy.”

In 2004, Tory MP Randy White’s forceful attack on the courts — “To heck with the courts… One of these days, we’re going to stand up in this country and say politicians make the laws; the courts do not” — were partly blamed for losing the Conservatives the election.

The party learned to suppress its antipathy toward the bench — for a while.

However, Mr. Harper’s unwillingness to acknowledge the Charter’s 30th anniversary two years ago was notable.

Until the late ’80s, the loudest chorus against the Charter actually hailed from the left, who feared Charter rulings would harm union rights, said Emmett Macfarlane, an assistant political science professor at the University of Waterloo and author of the 2012 book Governing from the Bench: The Supreme Court of Canada and the Judicial Role.

It was only after issues such as abortion and gay rights became legally contested that more conservative thinkers began to raise eyebrows.

“All of the people connected to Stephen Harper himself are the leading Canadian political scientists in terms of criticism of the courts and the Charter of Rights,” he said.

Among them was Ian Brodie, former chief of staff to Mr. Harper, who wrote a book in 2002 examining how special interest groups influenced law and policy.

“Judicial activism has been an issue for American conservatives for a few decades,” Mr. Brodie said in an e-mail. “But the big trigger in Canada was the social conservative reaction to court decisions on abortion and gay rights in Canada during the late 80s and early 1990s.”

Some of the criticism of the court proved to be fairly prescient.

Mr. Macfarlane said that while “judicial activism,” as detected by Western Canada’s most agitated editorialists, might be a bit far-fetched, judges do rely on their own ideology and values, particularly in cases that are extremely complicated, or for which there is little by way of precedent. And there’s little doubt the charter did usher in a sea change in how power is allocated and exercised in government.

“Yes, politics matters,” Mr. Macfarlane said. “But when we talk about the Harper government losing cases at court, we can very quickly forget that Brian Mulroney and Jean Chretien lost a lot of cases as well.”

Still, if recent rulings are any indication, Canadians should expect no end to conservative antipathy to the courts.

Last week, the court agreed to hear a case challenging the government’s minimum-sentencing requirements — a Conservative bread-and-butter crime policy. It’s also expected to rule next week on the use of National Security Certificates, a key tool of Tory anti-terror policy.

If the courts continue to overrule Parliament on issues that prove out of line with public mores, the courts themselves will become increasingly dragged into the political arena, Mr. Manning warned.

“I think the charter is going to be seen not as the ‘living tree’ that justices envisioned, but as a straitjacket that’s going to cause more and more pinch between the political class and the judiciary,” he said. If this happens, he believes there will be growing pressure to use the notwithstanding clause to deflect politically unpalatable rulings that elevate subjective judicial interpretations of constitutional meaning over popular will.

“The Liberal propaganda machine perpetuates a myth that the Canadian constitution is some extremely glorified document that everybody should bow down to, and it isn’t,” Mr. Manning said. “It’s another one of those political myths, and eventually it will fall under its own weight.”